Bitter Debate in Europe on U.S. Role / Washington's dominance of NATO creates wave of anti-Americanism

Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, April 15, 1999

1999-04-15 04:00:00 PDT Paris -- As bombing raids mount over Serbia, NATO's war against Slobodan Milosevic is paralleled by a bitter war of words raging inside the borders of the Atlantic Alliance itself.

The confrontation pits NATO's supporters against an unlikely coalition of opponents -- ranging from the Communist Party in Italy to the extreme right-wing National Front in France, along with a broad range of prominent intellectuals and mainstream politicians -- who view the intervention in Kosovo as a thinly disguised effort to impose Washington's will on Europe's future.

"Held on a leash by the Americans, we have violated international law and the charter of the United Nations," charges former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

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"Europe cannot accept the presence on its soil of a man (Milosevic) and a regime which, for nearly 10 years, has engaged in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and now in Kosovo, in ethnic cleansing operations, assassinations and massacres," responds French President Jacques Chirac.

Ironically, NATO's critics and supporters alike ask precisely the same question that troubles many Americans: Will Europe ever be able to police its own back yard?

Kosovo demonstrates "that a common European defense policy is brutally absent today, and also that such a policy has never appeared so necessary," Francois Hollande, first secretary of France's governing Socialist Party, said Friday.

"NATO has become the de facto department of diplomacy, defense and security in Europe," declares former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, a right-wing critic of the Kosovo intervention.

There is little sign that the controversy will halt the bombing, which is firmly backed by the center-left parties that govern 13 of the European Union's 15 member- states in 1999 and also by a majority of their voters.

But there is every sign that the bitterness will be lasting, as will European unhappiness with military reliance on the United States.

"The partnership with NATO in the Yugoslav crisis is simply a cloak, masking great differences between the United States and its European allies," a former high-ranking aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a Chronicle interview before the bombing campaign had even begun.

Since then, the cloak has decidedly come off, in a wave of the harshest anti-Americanism to sweep Western Europe since the Vietnam War.

The acrimony has been greatest in France, where suspicion of U.S. intentions always runs high and where the commitment of troops and equipment to the Kosovo intervention is the largest of any European country in the alliance.

HOSTILE COMMENTARIES

At times, newspaper commentaries are so unremittingly hostile to the United States that a reader might well imagine Paris is at war with the Pentagon, rather than with the Yugoslav army.

"In the event of total victory (in Kosovo), one would have to say that it is both a great military success for NATO -- that is, for the United States -- and an irreparable humanitarian catastrophe, a political setback for Europe," thundered Alain Joxe, director of France's elite Graduate School of Social Studies and an influential political pundit.

America's strategic and economic views "are dangerous and foreign to our political ethics," he wrote in Le Monde on Monday. Its activities in Kosovo "do not set the stage for postwar reconstruction, but for mafia chaos."

Regis Debray, a longtime adviser to late French President Francois Mitterrand, went so far as to charge that his fellow Europeans had become brain-dead automatons, their minds destroyed by American imperialism and too much exposure to frivolous U.S. cultural exports.

In a fog induced by overconsumption of McDonald's, CNN and Hollywood movies, "America is deprogramming Europe, which grows as uncivilized and myopic as its leader," he wrote in a widely quoted attack on the Kosovo intervention April 1.

"America: You have to be against her. That's the basic demand of intellectual conformism, on the left and on the right (in Europe)," French writer Pascal Bruckner answered in an angry reply. "In short, you put those who want to save the Kosovars on the same level as those who want to liquidate them."

PHILOSOPHER'S VIEW

If the memory of Auschwitz means anything, insists German philosopher Hans Magnus Enzenberger, "Europeans themselves are not merely capable of intervening (in Kosovo), we are morally obligated to do so."

Why then is the European Union so paralyzed, so wary of acting without U.S. leadership? With 3 million troops, the European defense establishment is more than able to meet the purely military challenge of Yugoslavia. Nor is it too pinched for cash to act.

The problem is that Europe's defense expenditures -- and more importantly, its decision-making procedures -- are parceled out over 15 central governments, legislatures and political party leaders. As most EU countries merge their economies and move toward a single currency, the prospects for a common defense policy remain cloudy.

If anything, those prospects are even dimmer than they were before 1999 opened. The first three months of this year were marked by unprecedented divisiveness and scandal in the EU, leading up to the wholesale resignation in late March of the organization's entire 20-member ruling European Commission and its president, Jacques Santer.

GLIMMER OF PROGRESS

Prior to the European Commission scandal, there had been a glimmer of progress. At a September Anglo-French summit in St. Malo, France, Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair signed a declaration urging that joint defense arrangements be considered.

But to date, concrete measures have been rare. Beyond the establishment of a small experimental Franco-German infantry force and the release of a 1997 position paper on further military integration, almost no steps have been taken to create permanent common security institutions.

Even in the position paper, both French and German strategists assume that their common efforts will be conducted under a larger NATO umbrella.

"The great force wielded by the United States in conflicts is that they are decisive and they act," concedes French Defense Minister Alain Richard.

Concern over Europe's dependence on America -- and its own indecisiveness -- has grown steadily since the first bloody phases of Yugoslavia's collapse between 1991 and 1995, which left 200,000 dead and 3 million homeless in Croatia and Bosnia.

Sent in as peacemakers, but hamstrung by the lack of a well-defined mandate, the European-led United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was powerless to halt massacres that transpired in plain sight.

The nadir came on July 10, 1995, when Serbian forces overran the eastern Bosnian city of Srebrenica, which was technically a U.N.-protected enclave. As Dutch troops helplessly watched, the Serbs disarmed and dragged off nearly all of the city's men. An estimated 8,000 to 10,000 are believed to have been summarily executed.

The war also resulted in hundreds of U.N. casualties, primarily among French, British and other European troops who were not allowed to defend themselves fully, much less defend millions of terrified civilians.

'NO ENEMY TO FIGHT'

"I left a mission in which there was no clear understanding what came next," said France's Lieutenant General Bertrand Guillaume de Lapresle, who resigned as commander in chief of UNPROFOR in 1995. "I was a general with no enemy to fight and no victory to win. What I can't put out of my mind is the 140 U.N. soldiers who gave their lives in Bosnia, and the 1,200 who were wounded."

By contrast, "NATO has a very clearly defined enemy and a clear determination to achieve a military victory," de Lapresle said.

"Welcome to Europe," a bitter French foreign legionnaire told a Chronicle reporter in 1995, shortly after their U.N. plane was hit by Serbian anti-aircraft fire over Sarajevo and forced into an emergency landing. "Our approach is to let them shoot at us as much as they like, and wait for the Americans to tell us when we can shoot back."

On August 30 of that year, NATO air strikes supervised by the United States were finally called in, and the Bosnian Serbs agreed to a cease-fire within a few weeks.

Bosnia cast the absence of a coordinated European defense policy in painfully stark terms, and set the controversial precedent that is now being followed in Kosovo.

"The Europeans -- essentially the Germans, British and French -- play their part in the (Kosovo) offensive. But they would have been perfectly unable to manage it without the United States," conclude French political analysts Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet.

WHY NO EUROPEAN NATION HAS EMERGED AS A LEADER

Behind Europe's acceptance of U.S. leadership in the Yugoslav crisis, however grudging and bitter, is the fact that the European Union itself has no leader. With the EU's executive branch and governing commission floundering in scandal and unprecedented disarray, none of the organization's member states seems ready to step in and provide direction.

Three nations -- Britain, France and Germany -- have the population size, global influence and military capabilities to claim such leadership. Yet for different reasons, each is unable to exercise it.

In Germany, the reason is history. The EU was established in the ruins of World War II, and its fundamental intention was to create a European-wide political buffer against the resurgence of expansionist German nationalism. Although Bonn commits a hefty $42 billion annually to defense, making it one of the world's five top military spenders, it is still relegated to a supporting role in military affairs.

Indeed, until the Kosovo intervention, to which it has contributed special Tornado fighters equipped with radar-jamming gear, Germany had never directly participated in a NATO action.

The British, whose widely admired political system and World War II victory might have led to pre-eminent status in postwar Europe, did not join the EU (then known as the Common Market) until 1973 and have often played a disruptive part in its unifying efforts since. After refusing to sign on to the euro, the EU's new single currency, and rejecting key trade and social agreements, the British have effectively opted out of European leadership by choice.

That leaves France, which was the central player in the foundation of the EU's parent body 40 years ago, and is the world's third largest defense spender with a yearly military budget of $48 billion. For many years, its dominance in Europe was unchallenged.

France's problem today is politics, and specifically the impact of "cohabitation" -- the French term for shared government, with power at the top split between left and right, between prime minister and president. Cohabitation has stymied French governance for most of the past 13 years, making it difficult for Paris to rule France efficiently, much less undertake leadership in a European war.

Europe's leadership quandary in a security crisis is compounded by a yawning technology gap between the old and new worlds, which has obliged French, British and German operations to rely on U.S. computers and satellites in battlefield command and control.

Four of the globe's five leading defense contractors are U.S. firms. Just two of them, Lockheed Martin and Boeing- McDonnell Douglas, have an annual sales turnover -- and research and development capacity -- 50 percent higher than all European defense firms combined.

"American 'hyper-power' irritates us because it bluntly reduces us to the recognition of our own historic diminishment," says Bruno Racine, a chief adviser to former French Prime Minister Alain Juppe.